Balenciaga

It seems half the designers currently working in menswear are
experimenting with proportions they're calling "couture." They mean the
exaggerated roundness and cocooning volumes pioneered by Cristóbal
Balenciaga half a century ago. Roundness in clothing is basically in the
public domain, but it's hard not to feel the house Balenciaga built has
some claim on its own creation. It, too, showed voluminous, egg-shaped
menswear for Spring 2013, citing house codes as always, but mentioning
postwar Japan as well, at the nexus of East and West. The guiding spirit
is Ryuichi Sakamoto, the avant-garde Japanese composer who has, at
times, stood literally at the intersection of the two. (He costarred in
Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence with a middle-period David Bowie.)

The collection is Japanese in key fabrics (like a textured cotton/silk
seersucker) and Japanese in key shapes (as in the robe-like oversize
kimono coats). It's also, thanks to exaggerated proportions, like those
of an extra-long, single-button suit jacket, the house's most
challenging menswear proposition in several seasons. Contrasting the
larger volumes is a new austerity. Here the new-classic leather jackets
brought back season after season get their sparest treatment yet: all
clean lines and no lapels, just a banded detail that looks like nothing
so much as a car grille.

A pixelated floral cried loudest for attention among the prints, but it
was actually two others—a moiré, borrowed from the archive,
on silk taffeta, and a kind of electric stripe—that hit on the
heart of things. They fairly vibrated. Push and pull. You couldn't ask
for a better capsule description of the collection.